Elementalisms: Competing Solutions for Water Scarcity in Vandana Shiva and Jack London
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the world’s fresh water supply grows increasingly threatened and access to that supply is mediated more and more by private organizations, multiple attempts have been made to establish permanent trade links between water-rich and water-poor regions, though these attempts have thus far been defeated by environmental, economic, or nationalistic factors. Corporate control of water, as a basic element of human life, holds menacing consequences in terms of humanitarianism and ecological stability. This intent of this article is to investigate several recent corporate successes in the arena of bulk water export from various locations in Alaska, beginning with Eklutna Lake outside of Anchorage and proceeding to current trade contracts in Sitka and future contracts on Adak Island. Alaska holds, by some estimates, 40% of the United States’, and 20% of the world’s, water supply, and it is thus far the only governed entity that has successfully sold water in bulk. Following Vandana Shiva’s advocacy of a “culture” of water in Water Wars (2002), this article suggests that the criteria enabling the recent, troubling boom in Alaskan water sales may be cultural as well as practical or economic. A close reading of Jack London’s “A Relic of the Pliocene” (1901) concludes that London, like Shiva, endorses a culture of unmediated contact and elemental interdependence between man and nature. However, while Shiva’s elementalism leads to a new culture of respect and reverence for water resources, London’s elementalism acts as a shield and justification for exploitation of natural resources, an attitude that speaks strongly to Alaska’s interest in privatizing its water supply.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".